Philosophy and Democracy

TL;DRAbstract

prestige of political very high these days. It commands attention of economists and lawyers, two groups of academics most closely connected to shaping of public policy, as it has not done in a long time. And it claims attention of political leaders, bureaucrats, and judges, most especially judges, with a new and radical forcefulness. command and claim follow not so much from fact that philosophers are doing creative work, but from fact that they are doing creative work of a special sort-which raises again, after a long hiatus, possibility of finding objective truths, true meaning, right answers, the philosopher's stone, and so on. I want to accept this possibility (without saying very much about it) and then ask what it means for democratic politics. What standing of philosopher in a democratic society? This an old question; there are old tensions at work here: between truth and opinion, reason and will, value and preference, one and many. These antipodal pairs differ from one another,

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